Archeologists Need to Know More About Hunting

One of my pet peeves are archeologists who do not know what the hell they are talking about when it comes to wildlife and hunting.

Take the dog.  

Please spare me the notion that wolves were first domesticated to aid in hunting. Complete nonsense. 

As any hunter will tell you, dogs are more likely to ruin hunting for big game than aid in it.  

How do you hunt deer?  Simple: shoot from a high stand or low hide with a bow and arrow.  That's the way it's done today, and it's the way it's always been done.  

What about small game? What about it? A wolf used as a dog is going to ruin far more rabbit hunts than help in them, and they are going to eat you out of cave and hut as well. Wolves are not bird dogs, and they do not train very easily.  Every circus has trained horses, bears, and lions, but none has trained wolves. 

The latest example of archeologist nonsense is the notion that Clovis points, found in New Mexico could not possibly have been used to hunt Mastodon because they are too brittle and could not pierce Mastodon or Mammoth hide and tissue deep enough to hit internal organs.

Right.  Idiocy.

As with hunting with dogs, one need only look up and ask a simple question:  How's it work TODAY among primitive people?

To put a point on it, while there are no primitive people using wolves to hunt game, there ARE primitive people hunting elephants -- and even whales -- with arrows and spears.

They do this TODAY.

How's that work?  

Simple:  Poison.  

And one of the most effective poisons -- Wolfsbane -- is found all over the world, from the Artic to Africa, from Europe to North and South America.

Yes, Elephants are hunted today with poison arrows and spears. 

In fact, about 70 percent of the elephants poached in Kenya's Tsavo National Park are killed with poison arrows, and the killing crews are often just one or two people.  

Even whales were once killed with Wolfsbane (aka Monkshood). 

As the Smithsonian Institute notes in a squib on a slate spear point in their Alaska Natives Collection:

Hunters armed with poison-tipped darts or spears set out in kayaks to kill humpback and fin whales. These men were ahhuhsulet, shamans who summoned spiritual power for the hunt through songs, talismans, and secret rituals. The poison they used was made from the roots of the monkshood flower. Whale poison, which was smeared on slate blades like this one, was considered to be so strong and dangerous that if birds flew over a place where it was stored they would drop dead from the sky.

 

Why would primitive people hunt big game?  For the same reason the San people (bushmen) of South Africa hunt Eland, Buffalo, and Elephants today:  a single kill can feed a village and provide vast amounts of dried meat to last through hard times.

With a poison arrow or spear, it's not much harder to kill an Elephant, Mammoth, or Giant Sloth than it is to kill a rabbit, deer, or seal.  And yes, even in primitive cultures, time was money.  Why spend a month killing 30 rabbits when you can spend a day killing and butchering a Mastodon or Elephant that might provide a ton of meat as well as a tough hide for shelter and shields, and heavy bone and ivory for tools? 

So, back to the Clovis points.

Big points can carry big amounts of poison, such as boiled down Wolfsbane.

It's really just that simple.